Published on September 10, 2018 Comments 9
The Fakest Fake News: The U.S. Government’s 9/11 Conspiracy Theory
Edward Curtin

A Review of 9/11Unmasked: An International Review Panel Investigation by David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth Woodworth

If you want to fathom today’s world, absolutely nothing is more important than to understand the truth about the attacks of September 11, 2001. This is the definitive book on the subject.

For seventeen years we have been subjected to an onslaught of U.S. government and corporate media propaganda about 9/11 that has been used to support the “war on terror” that has resulted in millions of deaths around the world. It has been used as a pretext to attack nations throughout the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa.

It has led to a great increase in Islamophobia since Muslims were accused of being responsible for the attacks. It has led to a crackdown on civil liberties in the United States, the exponential growth of a vast and costly national security apparatus, the spreading of fear and anxiety on a great scale, and a state of permanent war that is pushing the world toward a nuclear confrontation. And much, much more.

The authors of this essential book, David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth Woodworth, and all their colleagues who have contributed to this volume, have long been at the front lines trying to wake people up to the real news about 9/11. They have battled against three U.S. presidents, a vast propaganda machine “strangely” allied with well-known leftists, and a corporate mass media intent on serving deep-state interests, all of whom have used illogic, lies, and pseudo-science to conceal the terrible truth. Yet despite the establishment’s disinformation and deceptions, very many people have come to suspect that the official story of the September 11, 2001 attacks is not true.

With the publication of 9/11Unmasked: An International Review Panel Investigation, they now have a brilliant source book to use to turn their suspicions into certitudes. And for those who have never doubted the official account (or accounts would be more accurate), reading this book should shock them into reality, because it is not based on speculation, but on carefully documented and corroborated facts, exacting logic, and the scientific method.

The book is based on the establishment in 2011 of a scientific review project comprising 23 experts with a broad spectrum of expertise, including people from the fields of chemistry, structural engineering, physics, aeronautical engineering, airline crash investigation, piloting, etc. Their job was to apply systematic and disciplined analyses to the verifiable evidence about the 9/11 attacks. They used a model called the Delphi Method as a way to achieve best-evidence consensus.

This best-evidence consensus model is used in science and medicine, and the 9/11 Consensus Panel used it to examine the key claims of the official account(s). Each “Official Account” was reviewed and compared to “The Best Evidence” to reach conclusions. The authors explain it thus:

The examination of each claim received three rounds of review and feedback. According to the panel’s investigative model, members submitted their votes to the two of us moderators while remaining blind to one another. Proposed points had to receive a vote of at least 85 percent to be accepted…This model carries so much authority in medicine that medical consensus statements derived from it are often reported in the news.

They represent the highest standard of medical research and practice and may result in malpractice lawsuits if not followed.

This research process went on for many years, with the findings reported in this book. The Consensus 9/11 Panel provides evidence against the official claims in nine categories:

The Destruction of the Twin Towers
The Destruction of WTC 7
The Attack on the Pentagon
The 9/11 Flights
US Military Exercises on and before 9/11
Claims about Military and Political Leaders
Osama bin Laden and the Hijackers
Phone Calls from the 9/11 Flights
Insider Trading
Each category is introduced and then broken down into sub-sections called points, which are examined in turn. For example, the destruction of the Twin Towers has points that include, “The Claim That No One Reported Explosions in the Twin Towers,” “The Claim That the Twin Towers Were Destroyed by Airplane Impacts, Jet Fuel, and Fire,” “The Claim That There Were Widespread Infernos in the South Tower,” etc. Each point is introduced with background, the official account is presented, then the best evidence, followed by a conclusion. Within the nine categories there are 51 points examined, each meticulously documented through quotations, references, etc., all connected to 875 endnotes that the reader can follow. It is scrupulously laid out and logical, and the reader can follow it sequentially or pick out an aspect that particularly interests them.

The 9/11 Consensus Panel members describe their goal and purpose as follows:

The purpose of the 9/11 Consensus Panel is to provide the world with a clear statement, based on expert independent opinion, of some of the best evidence opposing the official narrative about 9/11.

The goal of the Consensus Panel is to provide a ready source of evidence-based research to any investigation that may be undertaken by the public, the media, academia, or any other investigative body or institution.

As a sociologist who teaches research methods and does much research, I find the Consensus Panel’s method exemplary and their findings accurate. They have unmasked a monstrous lie. It is so ironic that such serious scholars, who question and research 9/11, have been portrayed as irrational and ignorant “conspiracy theorists” by people whose thinking is magical, illogical, and pseudo-scientific in the extreme.

A review is no place to go into all the details of this book, but I will give a few examples of the acumen of the Panel’s findings.

As a grandson of a Deputy Chief of the New York Fire Department (343 firefighters died on 9/11), I find it particularly despicable that the government agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), that was charged with investigating the collapse of the Towers and Building 7, would claim that no one gave evidence of explosions in the Twin Towers, when it is documented by the fastidious researcher Graeme MacQueen, a member of The 9/11 Consensus Panel, that over 100 firefighters who were at the scene reported hearing explosions in the towers. One may follow endnote 22 to MacQueen’s research and his sources that are indisputable. There are recordings.

On a connected note, the official account claims that there were widespread infernos in the South Tower that prevented firefighters from ascending to the 78th floor. Such a claim would support the notion that the building could have collapsed as a result of fires caused by the plane crashing into the building. But as 9/11 Unmasked makes clear, radio tapes of firefighters ascending to the 78th floor and saying this was not so, prove that “there is incontrovertible evidence that the firefighter teams were communicating clearly with one another as they ascended WTC” and that there were no infernos to stop them, as they are recorded saying. They professionally went about their jobs trying to save people.

Then the South Tower collapsed and so many died. But it couldn’t have collapsed from “infernos” that didn’t exist. Only explosives could have brought it down.

A reader can thus pick up this book, check out that section, and use common sense and elementary logic to reach the same conclusion. And by reaching that conclusion and going no further in the book, the entire official story of 9/11 falls apart.

Or one can delve further, let’s say by dipping into the official claim that a domestic airline attack on the Pentagon was not expected. Opening to page 78, the reader can learn that “NBC’s Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski was warned of the Pentagon attack by an intelligence officer,” who specified the illogical spot where the attack would happen shortly before it did.

In Miklaszewski’s words, “And then he got very close to me, and, almost silent for a few seconds, he leaned in and said, ‘This attack was so well coordinated that if I were you, I would stay off the E Ring – where our NBC office was – the outer ring of the Pentagon for the rest of the day, because we’re next.’”

The authors say correctly, “The intelligence officer’s apparent foreknowledge was unaccountably specific.” For if a terrorist were going to fly a plane into Pentagon, the most likely spot would be to dive into the roof where many people might be killed, including top brass and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. To make an impossibly acrobatic maneuver to fly low into an outside wall would make no sense. And for the government to claim that this impossible maneuver was executed by the alleged hijacker Hani Hanjour, a man who according to documentation couldn’t even pilot a small plane, is absurd. But the intelligence officer knew what would happen, and the reader can learn this, and marvel.

Or the reader can start from the beginning and read straight through the book. They will learn in detail that the official version of the attacks of 9/11 is fake news at its worst. It is a story told for dunces.

Griffin and Woodworth and their colleagues simply and clearly in the most logical manner show that the emperor has no clothes, not even a mask.

Since knowing the truth about the attacks of September 11, 2001 is indispensable for understanding what is happening in today’s world, everyone should purchase and read Unmasking 9/11: An International Review Panel Investigation. Keep it next to your dictionary, and when you read or hear the latest propaganda about the 9/11 attacks, take it out and consult the work of the real experts. Their words will clarify your mind.

It is the definitive book on the defining event of the 21st century.

PLEASE SHARE TO HELP COMBAT SOCIAL MEDIA CENSORSHIP
Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)166Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)166Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)Click to share on Telegram (Opens in new window)2Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)2Click to share on Skype (Opens in new window)Click to share on AddToAny (Opens in new window)Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
Like this:
Loading...
THIS ENTRY WAS POSTED IN: 9/11, Arts and Entertainment, book reviews, Essays, Reviews
TAGGED WITH: 9/11, book reviews, David Ray Griffin, Edward Curtin
9 Comments

Sean O Braonain
September 11, 2018
Some of the best work unmasking the official 9/11 conspiracy theory is to be found at Ryan Dawson’s site
http://www.ancreport.com/ryan-dawson/
He focuses his attention on a thorough analysis of the redacted police interviews of various Mossad connected individuals arrested in NY after the event and later (of course) safely repatriated to Israel, where some even felt free to brag on live TV about their foreknowledge of the attack. Some of these were caught in possession of explosives on the day, some had been seen gleefully waiting with their video cameras in a suitable vantage point minutes before the first tower impact.
For me, not enough attention has been given to the obvious revelation of media collusion & coordination on the day. One small (well actually very large) glitch perfectly exposed the BBC’s involvement for instance, when with crossed wires (or some problem with the coordinated feed), they confidently reported the collapse of building 7 a full 20 minutes before it actually occurred, while showing us the ‘still standing’ building 7 in the background of their ‘live’ report.
I’ve mentioned this fact to a couple of trusting committed BBC watchers, but they refuse to believe it could ever have happened…
Loading...
2 1
Reply

flaxgirl
September 11, 2018
Yes, they’ve done a great job, however, the claim that 3,000 died and 6,000 were injured on 9/11 were injured needs investigation.
Loading...

Reply

vexarb
September 11, 2018
Curtin`s review gets my vote. As for Oddis, he can first “virulently” oppose as in his review of two years ago, or come round to thinking it’s time to sit on the fence as in his present review, and so on by gradual progression for as long as he likes. Meanwhile, reality grinds on.
“The truth rarely, if ever, convinces its opponents; it simply outlives them”. — “Mad” Max Planck, physicist.
Loading...
2
Reply

rilme
September 11, 2018
That’s a good review. You should dump the first two.
Loading...
2
Reply

binra
September 10, 2018
“No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.”
~ Alan Bullock, in Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives
The ability to pull so many strings in both planning and executing the event and its controlled narrative is a proclamation of power. Broad spectrum dominance from the inside out.
Loading...
6
Reply

paulcarline
September 10, 2018
Haven’t read this yet – but I do hope they demolished the idea of any hijacked planes hitting any buildings. ‘No planes’ is not theory, but demonstrable fact.
Loading...

Reply

Stephen Sivonda
September 11, 2018
Paulcarline, I’ve been over the years skeptical of the whole original story. Over time , reading the many articles and youtube videos…it has garnered my opinion that it was a pack of lies. About 5 years back I joined the AE911truth.org group.. Just recently I saw a post about the picture of a jet engine lying on the sidewalk outside the building before it came down I recognized that picture as the same one I originally saw about 5 years ago. Back then I recognized it as NOT belonging to the model of the plane that purportedly crashed into the tower. How did I know that? My 32 + years working for the jet engine manufacturer of those engines. The photo can ,no doubt, be found on a search. In any case the recent article said the same as I just did…that engine was not on a passenger plane ,but on a drone . That is a plane set up to be flown by remote control. So…that is what was used….BTW the military uses drones like that for testing the “ground to air ” missile defenses. So, there was no need to actually hijack real planes with people . The pentagon hit by a missile and there was no plane in PA that went down in that field. Both the pentagon and Shanksville PA had NO real remnants of aircraft parts. And believe me there should have been jet engines. they are too big and tough to burn up into nothing. Persevere for the truth.
Loading...
5
Reply

bill
September 11, 2018
Certainly excellent testimony of what is yet another glaring hole in the official narrative, a 747 P and W engine represented as belonging to a 767 (and certainly not from Flight 11, a GE CF6) …..
Loading...
1
Reply
Please note the opinions expressed in the comments do not necessarily reflect those of the editors or of OffG as a whole

On September 10, 2018, I published a laudatory review of the new book, 9/11 Unmasked: An International Review Panel Investigation by David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth Woodworth. It is the definitive book on the defining event of the 21st century. The book concludes that the official version(s) of the attacks of 11 September 2001 are false. The review was subsequently reposted at many publications. There was great reader response and interest in the book, which was due for official release the next day, 11 September. My review provided a link to the book’s Amazon page that noted the 11 September availability date.

By the next day readers were responding in great number that the Amazon site was reporting the book was “out of print,” when in fact it had just been published. This “out of print” notification lasted until the evening of 13 September when it was changed to “in stock on September 30, 2018.”

By the following morning it was changed to “in stock on September 21, 2018,” only to be changed again between 11-12 PM on September 14 to “in stock on September 24, 2018,” where it remains as of noon on Saturday the 15th. It is unheard of for a book that has an official release date and that is available straight from the publisher to be listed as “out of print.” Amazon Canada continues to report that the book “has not yet been released.” And obviously, all the date changes that push the book’s availability back by weeks suggest a clear-cut effort by Amazon to make sure readers cannot obtain the book quickly and in a timely manner from the most popular source, if ever.

Will they soon announce that the book will never be available for national security considerations or because it violates Amazon’s “content guidelines”? The book’s publisher, Interlink Publishing, is selling the book now and says Amazon has the books. So why is Jeff Bezos’s company playing this game? His other major business, The Washington Post, (known as the CIA’s newspaper) is surely not going to review the book, nor would their editorial staff post encomiums to David Ray Griffin, Elizabeth Woodworth, their colleagues in this important research.

How do you feel about reviewing a new 9/11 book for the anniversary? I know you’re a sceptic but that is why I’d value your input …

Two years ago, on the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11, OffGuardian ran my review of Dylan Avery’s Loose Change. Except it wasn’t a review but a pouring of vitriol on the film’s central assertion that the events of September 11, 2001 were an inside job.

Reception below the line was hostile. But among the cat-calls were voices I could not ignore: voices of reason from dudes who’d done their homework and whose tones were sober; friendly even. I promised to re-assess the truther case and return either to concede and apologise or reaffirm my views with better arguments. I gave no date but strongly and at the time sincerely implied it would be a few months tops. Not two years.

Why the delay? I’m not afraid of saying, I was wrong. I’ve had practise and should I find it was me, not the 911 truthers, who’d been deluded it wouldn’t be personally implicating in the way coming out as an active paedophile or closet tory would. As fess-ups go, it would be at the egg-on-face as opposed to long custodial sentence end of the scale. I can do egg on face. Like I said, I’ve had practice.

The delay is due – I’m not offering this as excuse but as reason – to my aversion to what looked a right royal rabbit hole. Investing scores if not hundreds of hours sifting a mire of claim and counter claim did not appeal. Now if you say this was too big a question to be back-burnered on such flimsy grounds, I’d agree, though I’ve not been idle. I’ve had much to go at with mendacious narratives on Syria, Russia and Corbyn, while trying to convey, mainly to those on the left, that capitalism’s deep unfairness is the least of it; that its innermost laws of motion pose an existential threat.

But a promise is a promise, especially one made from a hole of my own digging. If I resented the diverting of time and energy, I hadn’t far to look for the culprit.

Within minutes of reading Catte’s email I’d hit send on this reply:

Could be an opportunity…What kind of turnaround time are you thinking?

But a further apology is in order. Regardless of whether I still thought truthers wrong, I was always going to have to say sorry for the sneering tone of my 2016 piece. So sure had I been of the logic of my case, a logic I’ll return to, I’d seen no need to address the empirical underpinnings of theirs.

(At the time, my exposure to truthism had come from armchair conspiracists too idle or brain fogged to put together a decent argument but happy to bang out link-heavy emails with a simple subtext: you’re wrong – read this and this and this … Plus, of course, Avery’s film: so bad that some truthers saw it as part of the cover up; a false flag in its own right to damn by its very shoddiness their case against the official narrative. Indeed, one BTL critic of my 2016 piece picked up on this point to accuse me of straw-mannery.)

So … apologies, mea culpas and attempts at self analysis duly offered, let me turn to 9/11 Unmasked, by David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth Woodworth. I’ll start with what we can agree is the ‘official narrative’.

SEPTEMBER 11, 2001: THE OFFICIAL ACCOUNT

This has two threads. One is the popular perception, framed by media coverage at the time, of what happened. The other is the combined wisdom of later government reports, most importantly that of the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) in 2005. Both threads assert that nineteen devout Muslims hijacked four airliners to fly them at high profile targets in separate but coordinated acts of mass murder and suicide.
New York’s World Trade Centre (WTC) Towers 1 and 2 took devastating hits to, respectively, floors 93-99 and 75-85. On impact the two planes, both from Boston Logan with tanks full for long haul flight, sprayed tons of aviation fuel (kerosene aka paraffin) whose ignition triggered an inferno so intense as to melt the steel skeletons of both towers[1] and cause not only their spectacular freefall but, ten hours later, that of WTC 7, which no plane had struck. No plan was in place to stop such an attack because no military scenario had envisaged transcontinental airliners as missiles.
A third plane was flown so low as to bury itself in the first and second floors of the Pentagon Building, across the Potomac from Washington DC.
The fourth was brought down in Pennslyvania by passengers – knowing themselves doomed but alerted by phone calls of the New York attacks – bent on thwarting the hijackers and saving other lives.

Before turning to the methodology used by Griffin and Woodworth to query this official narrative, a word about its ‘popular’ and ‘formal’ threads. The authors do a good job of showing that, where the two are in contradiction on matters of fact, we needn’t be 24-carat conspiracy freaks to suppose a tidying up – by revision, withheld evidence and refusal to acknowledge glaring inconsistencies – of contemporaneous accounts. Nor to suppose that such airbrushing on the part of subsequent inquiries goes beyond what we’d expect of officialdom covering up incompetence. Rather, to suppose airbrushing on this scale to have only one conceivable purpose: removing hostages to fortune and threats to overall narrative coherence and credibility.

9/11 Unmasked: the methodology

[we] decided … to form a panel of twenty-some independent researchers well-versed on 9/11 with a broad spectrum of expertise. Dubious claims embedded in the official account of 9/11 would be presented to the panelists separately to see if they, with no consultation among themselves, would reach consensus on whether there was sufficient basis to declare the claim false.

In response to our invitation to potential members, a panel of twenty-three people with varying professional backgrounds came together to apply disciplined analysis to the verifiable evidence about the 9/11 attacks. The 9/11 Panel includes people from the fields of physics, chemistry, structural engineering, aeronautical engineering, piloting, airplane crash investigation, medicine, journalism, psychology, and religion. The members are named on the Acknowledgments page.

– Introduction, pp vii-viii

I’m not happy with this. People from the fields of … leaves too much scope for cherry picking a-priori truthers who may not represent their disciplines, or even have relevant expertise. As for that in response to our invitation … what would we make of a trial, for black-on-white capital murder in fifties Alabama, whose jurors had responded to a call for home-owning volunteers?

Finally, the authors don’t say what steps they took to safeguard no consultation.

In peer reviewed scientific work these would be terminal flaws[2], while a criminal defence team would have a field day discrediting the prosecution’s expert witnesses. But here? Given the context, are they fatal? That rather depends on whether this ‘methodology’ is crucial to the authors’ case, or gimmick in an otherwise sober presentation of evidence too compelling to need such treatment. I think the latter.

STRUCTURE AND TONE

Here I’m more impressed. The tone is lucid, free of sensationalism and to a high standard of literacy. These are good writers, too confident in the strength of their case to go in for flashy phrasing, cheap shots or intellectual short cuts. As a bonus, proof reading is to a high standard and that’s significant given the intricacy of argument and supporting detail.

But what about structure? Here 9/11 Unmasked manages the conflicting pulls of clarity, and engagement with complex detail whose significance could easily be lost on the most attentive reader. It does so by the tried and tested method of layering content – never less than three tiers; four in labyrinthine arguments – to present sub-claims, micro-points and supporting factoids without their obscuring the bigger picture. I dived in seas of minutiae without fear of drowning.

(Two carps. My PDF version could and should have hot-linked its 875 inline references to footnote text, enabling sceptics to make fast random checks as to whether a footnote really does the job implied in the main text. Given such controversial content, and high standard of presentation elsewhere, it will be a pity if this is not corrected. Similarly, a book so necessarily replete with acronyms really does need a glossary.)

Still on structure, the 320 page book’s main section divides into 51 short chapters, each addressing a discrete issue, or set of interrelated issues, arising from the official account. All chapters have the same structure: introduction .. official account .. best evidence .. conclusion. Where successive official accounts differ – often as not with that same whiff of ‘tidying up’ – the account-best evidence-conclusion cycle iterates until the chapter ends with an overall conclusion. By such tiering, bird’s eye views give way to two or more descending levels of detail in an elegant solution to an old problem: how to evaluate the trees without obscuring the forest. Speaking as a retired academic, if this were a textbook I’d be singing its praises to students.

NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE

In challenging virtually every aspect of the official narrative, the authors’ evidence falls into these broad and not always orthogonal categories:
Scientific knowledge, on such as the melting point of steel and whether any fire triggered by exploding aviation fuel could reach it. This impacts on the crown jewel of truther claims: that the towers could not have been brought down, in the manner the world saw on its TV screens, by the forces claimed by NIST 2005 as sole cause.[3]
Architectural, engineering and other professional knowhow on such as: whether those WTC beams and columns could come apart in the manner claimed by NIST; whether any man with minimal flight training could execute that low altitude turn into the Pentagon; whether in 2001 it was possible to make a cell phone call from a plane at 30,000 feet.
Forensic evidence, on such as whether nanothermite (classic signature of controlled detonation) was found in the WTC debris; and whether CCTV footage, placing the nineteen men in the places claimed, can be relied on.
Witnesses on the scene whose statements pose serious problems for the official narrative.
Inconsistencies within the official narrative on points where, even after ‘tidying up’, it lacks internal coherence else uses circular or other flawed forms of reasoning.
Lack of fit with known realities, such as that flying an airliner into a skyscraper, far from being an unforeseen event, had in fact been played out in wargame scenarios.
Suspicious behaviour by key players, in particular Cheney, Rumsfeld and senior military commanders; and abnormal levels of put-option and short-selling in the days before 9/11.

As implied by my recurring use of ‘such as’, the above barely scratches the surface of the evidence assembled in this book. But how good is it?

QUALITY OF EVIDENCE

I’m not a physicist, engineer, military expert or lawyer. What I am (by training, disposition and life experience) is good at evaluating, once I take the time to consider them, the strengths and weaknesses of arguments, especially when laid out with such commendable clarity. If the hard facts deployed to support higher level assertions bear up to expert scrutiny (and if they don’t, the authors are fools as well as charlatans since expert scrutiny is inevitable) then this is as strong a prima facie case for throwing out NIST, and its predecessors, as ever confronted an official cover up.

It follows that an inquiry quite unprecedented – a truly independent panel with no-holds access to all materials and witnesses, and immune from intimidation by pretty much the most powerful interests on earth – would be needed in reply to the gauntlet Griffin and Woodworth have thrown down.

I fear that no such inquiry will occur. Instead, eminent psychologists who’ve never – as I’d never – deigned to engage with evidential details will continue to publish acclaimed drivel on the pathology and pitiable delusions of all conspiracy theorists, citing all 9/11 truthers as textbook examples.

WHAT ABOUT THE LOGICAL CASE?

I promised to revisit this. The problems for me were always the number of conspirators and, related, complexity of so comprehensively elaborate an inside job, and whether the putative gains might justify the risks. I’ll consider each in turn.

Numbers. The only safe number for a conspiracy is one. Since that’s an oxymoron, let’s move to two. At least you’ll know, if you didn’t blab, who did. But when we get to three, boy, that’s when the problems really kick in. But here? Here we’re talking hundreds if not thousands of conspirators, every last one a party to mass murder and yet, seventeen years on, we’ve had not a single breaking of ranks; not one death bed confession.

Complexity and scale. While America has form on false flag ops, they’ve been simple affairs. It’s one thing to fake or even execute an attack on a US destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin. That can be done with a couple of light craft manned by a few Navy SEALs, hand picked men whose omerta culture minimises risk of leak. But if hard core truthers are right – I’ll come to soft core shortly – this would be a false flag op of unprecedented and incredible dimensions. To what end? The question brings us to my final logical objection.

Risk/benefits.The most cited rationale for 9/11 as an inside job is that it legitimated the ‘War on Terror’ – its Guantanamos, Patriot Acts and expansion of the spy-state – and/or wars on the Middle East which, as many know and I’ve argued elsewhere, are not driven by the reasons Western leaders and media would have us believe.

I don’t downplay the value to the US ruling class of such legitimation, but do question whether such prizes needed so elaborate, risky and, yes, evil[4] a deed. To evaluate such a proposition, the two putative gains need to be disentangled.

On wars in the Middle East, we’ve seen millions slain and nations ruined on the basis of casus belli far simpler: WMDs; nasty dictators. And while ‘going after’ Bin Laden worked in Afghanistan, it was an embarrassment in Saddam’s Iraq: no haven for salafists. It’s true of course that people told they face a terrible threat aren’t the most critical thinkers, but that can be turned on its head. If it’s so easy to fool the worried masses, why bother with such an elaborate ‘reason’ as 9/11, given the logistical problems summarised here?

I have an easier time buying the idea of the War on Terror as legitimated by 911. At least you don’t have to explain, even to audiences as credulous as American patriots, how the likes of Saddam wind up in bed with jihadists. But the question ending the previous paragraph stands. It still doesn’t stack up.

So that’s my logical case (oh, and there is the small matter of why the conspirators left so glaring an audit trail) and Griffin and Woodworth don’t even try to address it. In this they are as one with other truthers I know. Ditto in offering no alternative scenario for what they think happened on 9/11: not even for the softer version that Team Bush didn’t plan an inside job but, forewarned of an attack, let it happen for reasons already sketched out.

But before we damn them for such omissions, far less see their case as fatally flawed, let’s ask this question. Does 9/11 Unmasked cross, by its detailed evidence and reasoning for rejecting the official account, the threshold for being taken seriously? I say it does.

Now let’s ask another. Does it fall to those with compelling evidence of a monstrous crime to say why it happened? It would be dashed sporting of them, for sure, but can we in fairness demand it? I say we can’t.

In the world of Agatha Christie, Poirot ends each case by assembling the suspects in the conservatory. Tweaking waxed moustache, he eliminates one unpleasant character after another before fixing on the unpleasant character who is also the killer. He then sets out a convincing but unforeseen motive, followed by evidence to apply noose to neck.

In the world of Agatha Christie.

In my world, if you and others, upstanding citizens all, catch me with jam smeared face, crumbs to lips and three jam tarts in my pocket, still warm from cook’s oven; if, moreover, you have six witnesses of equally unblemished character swearing they saw me climb through the vicar’s kitchen window to lift the tarts and leg it, need you then, to secure a conviction for aggravated burglary, disprove my indignant protests, backed by two drinking pals and a dodgy doctor, that I loathe jam, have a lethal allergy to pastry and too low an IQ to have pulled off so audacious a heist? I say you needn’t.

On which note I’ll close – with this recommendation for all who deem, as I had, the 9/11 truther case too daft for serious consideration. Buy this book.

NOTES:
It’s important to note that claims of melting steel do not feature in the most important of the 9/11 reports.
Peer review is on balance a good thing, but not the be-all and end-all many assume. In times of paradigm shift within a science it can be a reactionary force, while in the context of accusations of mass conspiracy, demanding it comes close to circular reasoning.
To be fair, whatever was said prior to NIST 2005, an FAQ page on its site does not make the molten steel claim. Rather, it says ‘… the WTC towers collapsed because: (1) the impact of the planes severed and damaged support columns, dislodged fireproofing insulation coating the steel floor trusses and steel columns, and widely dispersed jet fuel over multiple floors; and (2) the subsequent unusually large number of jet-fuel ignited multi-floor fires (which reached temperatures as high as 1,000 degrees Celsius, or 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit) significantly weakened the floors and columns with dislodged fireproofing to the point where floors sagged and pulled inward on the perimeter columns. This led to the inward bowing of the perimeter columns and failure of the south face of WTC 1 and the east face of WTC 2, initiating the collapse of each of the towers. Also to be fair, 9/11 Unmasked avoids a widespread strawman argument. Its Chapter 2 asserts only that: ‘… office fires, even if fed by jet fuel (which is essentially kerosene), could not have weakened the steel structure of these buildings sufficiently to collapse as suddenly as they did’
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that killing three thousand Americans is more evil than slaughtering millions of Arabs by sanctions, bombs and shells of depleted uranium. I’m saying that those who order death from afar will tell themselves, as they lay head to pillow at night, that it was to save greater suffering. Maybe those authorising 9/11 as inside job, if that’s what happened, will do the same but, given the way humans manage cognitive dissonance, they’ll have a tougher time of it._________________www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.orgwww.rethink911.orgwww.patriotsquestion911.comwww.actorsandartistsfor911truth.orgwww.mediafor911truth.orgwww.pilotsfor911truth.orgwww.mp911truth.orgwww.ae911truth.orgwww.rl911truth.orgwww.stj911.orgwww.v911t.orgwww.thisweek.org.ukwww.abolishwar.org.ukwww.elementary.org.ukwww.radio4all.net/index.php/contributor/2149http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
https://37.220.108.147/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/

Elizabeth Woodworth has just published THE definitive book on the 9/11 attacks with the painstaking help of the 9/11 Consensus Panel of experts to agree on the major points of evidence and proof.
Her book just published is '9/11 Unmasked: An International Review Panel Investigation' (2018) is co-authored with legendary mega-conspiracy sleuth David Ray Griffin. Table of Contents: Introduction, I. The Destruction of the Twin Towers, II. The Destruction of WTC 7, III. The Attack on the Pentagon, IV. The 9/11 Flights, V. US Military Exercises On and Before 9/11, VI. The Military and Political Leaders, VII. Osama bin Laden and the Hijackers, VIII. The Phone Calls from the 9/11 Flights, IX. The Question of Insider Trading, X. Conclusion
For seventeen years we have been subjected to an onslaught of U.S. government and corporate media propaganda about 9/11 that has been used to support the “war on terror” that has resulted in millions of deaths around the world. It has been used as a pretext to attack nations throughout the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa.
It has led to a great increase in Islamophobia since Muslims were accused of being responsible for the attacks. It has led to a crackdown on civil liberties in the United States, the exponential growth of a vast and costly national security apparatus, the spreading of fear and anxiety on a great scale, and a state of permanent war that is pushing the world toward a nuclear confrontation. And much, much more.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/11-Unmasked-International-Review-Investigatio n/dp/1623719747

You cannot post new topics in this forumYou cannot reply to topics in this forumYou cannot edit your posts in this forumYou cannot delete your posts in this forumYou cannot vote in polls in this forumYou can attach files in this forumYou can download files in this forum